1. Field of Invention
The present application relates to focal plane arrays (FPAs) and more particularly to deformable focal plane arrays (DFPAs).
2. Brief Description of Related Art
Focal plane arrays (FPAs) are critical components of many modern imaging systems. A vast majority of FPA's are used for traditional, narrow field of view (FOV) applications, such as cell phone cameras, and accordingly, substantially all available FPAs have flat focal planes and are designed to better focus on such narrow FOVs. Typically, each pixel in the FPA will have a limited FOV, of about few degrees, and many high-performance surveillance systems requiring 60-180 degrees of FOV rely on a large number of FPAs to create a composite, wide FOV, high-resolution image. Unfortunately, because of the narrow FOV design, using standard lenses cause much of the area viewed by such wide FOV systems to be either severely out of focus or invisible on the flat focal planes of available FPA's.
The traditional solution to this problem is to create a highly complex telecentric lens to direct the light from all directions onto the flat focal plane to obtain a very wide FOV. However, this can increase lens complexity by requiring double or more the number of elements of a typical standard lens. Such increased complexity severely increases production times, costs, and loss rates. All of these disadvantages are multiplied by the number of lenses in the system, making wide FOV systems highly expensive and difficult to make for low cost and high volume applications, such as the cell phone cameras.